Like Tennyson's lotus eaters (in "The Lotus Eaters," 1832), the people who are searching out Hawaika are drifting, giving up: "Perfect, like the rest of this," Ross disdainfully comments on the beauty of the planet. And as it is for the lotus eaters, the never changing, peaceful panorama which lacks human life and therefore conflict has sapped the energy from the crew until they are dispersed and wiped out by the storm. Only the fighters like Ross, Ashe, and Karana survived the disaster. In ancient Hawaika, the Fonatanna are also almost victims of the languid inaction of centuries, which has weakened them and made them a dying race.

Karana, perfectly in tune with nature, has a literary "sister" in the similarly named Indian girl Karana, heroine of Scott O'Dell's The Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960; see separate entry). Like the Indian girl, the Polynesian woman is enough...